‘Putinism’ Is Nationalism

• China, Japan, Korea, India, Hungary, Turkey & more looking to shake off shackles of New World Order.

By Patrick J. Buchanan —

“Abe tightens grip on power asJapanese shun election.” So ranthe page one headline of The FinancialTimes on the victory ofPrime Minister Shinzo Abe in December’s elections.

Abe is the most nationalistic leader of postwarJapan. He is rebooting nuclear power, building upJapan’s military and asserting its rights in territorial disputes with China and Korea.

And he is among a host of leaders of large andemerging powers who may fairly be described as the new nationalistic strong men.

China’s Xi Jinping is another. Staking a claim toall the islands in the South and East China Seas,moving masses of Han Chinese into Tibet andUighur lands to swamp native peoples and purgingold comrades for corruption, Xi is the strongest leader China has seen in decades.

He sits astride what may now be the world’slargest economy and is asserting his own MonroeDoctrine. Hong Kong’s democracy protests weretolerated until Xi tired of them. Then they were swept off the streets.

Call it “Putinism.” It appears to be rising, whilethe New World Order of Bush I, the “global hegemony”of the neocons and the democracy crusade of Bush II seem to belong to yesterday.

Narendra Modi, leader of the Hindu nationalistparty who was denied entry into the United Statesfor a decade for complicity in or toleration of a massacre of Muslims is now prime minister of India.

“Members of the rightwing Rashtriya SwayamsevakSangh,” The Financial Times reports, “the Organizationof National Volunteers that gave birth tothe Bharatiya Janata party headed by Modi—havebeen appointed to key posts in the governing partyand cultural institutions. Nationalists have railed inpublic against the introduction of ‘Western’ practicessuch as wearing bikinis on the beach, puttingcandles on birthday cakes and using English in schools—all to the chagrin of fretful liberals.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is another such leader.

Once seen as a model of the enlightened rulerwho blended his Islamic faith with a secular state,seeking friendship with all of his neighbors, Erdoganhas declared cold war on Israel, aided the IslamicState in Syria and seems to be reigniting thewar with the Kurds, distancing himself from hisNATO allies and the U.S. and embracing Putin’s Russia.Not since Ataturk has Turkey had so nationalistic a leader.

And as the democracy demonstrators wererouted in Hong Kong, so, too, were the Tahrir Square“Arab Spring” demonstrators in Egypt, home country to one in four Arabs.

With the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the MuslimBrotherhood came to power in free elections,but was then overthrown by the Egyptian Army.General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi is now president and rules as autocratically as Mubarak, or Nasser before.

Thousands of the Muslim Brotherhood are inprison, hundreds face the death penalty. Yet, despitethe military coup that brought Sisi to power, and the repression, the American aid continues to flow.

What do these leaders have in common?

All are strong men. All are nationalists. Almostall tend to a social conservatism from which Westerndemocracies recoil. Almost none celebrate democracy or democratic values the way we do.

And almost all reject America’s claim to be the“indispensable nation” or “exceptional nation” and superpower leader.

U.S. writer Fareed Zakaria lists as “crucial elementsof Putinism . . . nationalism, religion, socialconservatism, state capitalism and governmentdomination of the media. They are all, in some wayor another, different from and hostile to, modernWestern values of individual rights, tolerance, cosmopolitanism and internationalism.”

Yet not every American revels in the sewer thatis our popular culture. Not every American believeswe should impose our democratist ideology onother nations. Nor are Big Media and Hollywooduniversally respected. Patriotism, religion and socialconservatism guide the lives of a majority of Americans today.

As the Associated Press reports this weekend,Putinism finds echoes across Central and WesternEurope. Hungary’s Viktor Orban has said he sees in Russia a model for his own “illiberal state.”

The National Front’s Marine Le Pen wants tobring France into a new Gaullist Europe, stretching“from the Atlantic to the Urals,” with France seceding from the EU superstate.

“Of the 24 right-wing populist parties that tookabout a quarter of the European Parliament seats inMay elections, 15 are listed as ‘committed’ to Russia,” reports Associated Press.

These rising right-wing parties are “partners” ofRussia in that they “share key views—advocacy oftraditional family values, belief in authoritarianleadership, a distrust of the U.S. and support for strong law and order measures.”

While the financial collapse caused Orban toturn his back on the West, says Zakaria, to the Hungarianprime minister, liberal values today embody“corruption, sex and violence,” and Western Europehas become a land of “freeloaders on the backs of welfare systems.”

If America is a better country today than it hasever been, why are so many, East and West, recoiling from what we offer now?

There is no nation without nationalism. No wonder people all over the world want to retain their identities and nations. Given the U.S. world empire’s (or rather, it’s messianic neo/con/libs) attempts to transform foreign nations resistance will intensify, I predict.